I've had other experiences with homeless men turning down food when I offered it. I know that my father-in-law would be (and has been, in the past) happy on the street, using his money for cigarettes and gambling with his friends. There are a lot of different kinds of people that would need to be accounted for and different motivations.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-01/ezard-homelessness-and...
Further, I don't have much money. I cannot afford a lot of stuff for myself. So I can only help with necessities. And I don't want to judge whether any given person is lying.
In conclusion, I never hand out money. But I've bought quite a few bags of groceries for strangers.
Freedom isn't freedom without the option to fuck up.
The problem is that the US system has such incredibly low social mobility that it prevents any alternative to fucking up.
The mythology of personal choice applied to situations over which hardly anyone has actual personal control is perniciously misleading.
The "undeserving poor" - feckless, addicted, irresponsible - is just as much of a cliche as the opposite.
In fact, BI research shows that most people don't waste the money. They use it to improve their lives - sometimes by starting small businesses that wouldn't be possible without BI.
I believe that the concept of "deserving" or "undeserving" poverty is not just unhelpful but actually misleading, and creates a great deal of unnecessary confusion. It is more useful to ignore the personal details and look at the systems. We can't change other people; we can rarely change ourselves; but we can certainly change systems, because they are human creations in the first place. So that's how we should approach poverty.
I am in favor of basic income as an improvement on and replacement for other forms of social support, for a variety of reasons: it seems like a more efficient way to move money around, it seems like a more effective way to distribute resources to people in need of them, and it seems overall like a more egalitarian, less judgemental way of dealing with a whole complex of problems which currently create a great deal of suffering. It is simple enough to feel like good engineering. It is fair enough to feel sustainable. It is non-ideological enough that I feel reasonably sure it would be difficult to use it as a mechanism of social control against weirdo outliers, like I am, but who aren't fortunate enough to have access to the same resources I do.
By "option to fuck up" I mean simply the freedom to do something other than mainstream opinion thinks you should. In these examples, people clearly believe it would be a bad idea for someone begging on the street to use the money they earn to buy alcohol. Well, on average, that's probably true. But just because someone is in a desperate way, I don't believe that gives me (or you, or anyone) the right to tell them what choices they should make. It's still their life. If I am willing to hand the guy on the street corner my spare $5, I have to be willing to accept that he's going to do whatever he thinks best with that money. If I can't be happy with that I shouldn't give him the money. But I believe that each person generally is the best judge of what is best for themself; I'd like it if the society around me would leave me free to make my own choices, not because I'm successful enough not to have to beg for money on the street, but because that's how I think we should all treat each other all the time, regardless of circumstances.
And that's without even getting into the problem of perverse incentives involved in giving money to people for asking for it.
If someone asks me for money, and I give them money, it becomes their money, and it is none of my business what they choose to do with it, any more than it is any of their business (or yours!) what I would have done with it if I kept it.
Otherwise, you're not really giving them help, you're taking some amount of control over their life.
It isn't if your idea of help is unconditional donation. But is there anything wrong if I see donations as investments (in society) with expected returns on the same? Would I be wrong in trying to maximize my returns?
The point is, just giving money does not absolve us of our moral responsibility. If I donate with an objective of social good, not just with the idea of dispensing my spare wealth, it is my right and duty to see that my investments give the maximal return, i.e. maximal social good.
Of course I can be wrong/ suboptimal in my investment strategies but then I can improve.
I think this depends on what you mean by "rely on". I could see many people who are very capable of managing their money relying on BI to allow them to take behaviors that would be risky in the absence of BI. For example, a college student who is choosing between starting a small business or interviewing at larger companies may significantly rely on the BI when deciding to start their business.
However I agree that, when viewing BI as a safety net, those who would need it are disproportionately likely to also need help managing the money.
This belief is the underpinning for most current welfare systems, but is there any evidence supporting it?
Some citations to studies indicating the opposite is true:
The richer the society you live in, the more it becomes lbhe snhyg[1] that you are poor. Imagine how hard you would have to work to be homeless in the world of Star Trek TNG, for example.
[1] I rot13'd that text because it's not the best expression, and it might knock some people off, but I don't have time to euphemize things for adults.
Anything other than focusing on the core drives and desires of man is superficial at best and wasted at worst.
We live in a world now where we get half the porridge our parents did, and he's teaching us how to starve and hide porridge in our pockets for rainy days. He's part of the problem and a distraction.
Of course he did. Never, never, never, ever give money to panhandlers.
Not being flippant; there's a reason this sign exists:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/86/70/85/86708570f...
and many more alike.
As an example, I once had a homeless guy ask me for money outside a grocery store. I suggested that we go inside and get him whatever food he wanted, and he said he'd wait for me outside. Sure enough he was gone by the time I returned. I'm fairly certain he only wanted the money for alcohol or drugs. That kind of person doesn't save money for food, they beg for food and use the money for other purposes.
If you made the program automatically adjust your BI down when you started accepting food from government programs, that would basically act as the government stepping in for people who just aren't able to handle money.